


Shell Shocked

by bananas_are_good_9



Series: Banana's Trash Pile [2]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Abusive Parents, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Child Abuse, F/M, M/M, Not a Happy Story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 01:34:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2330372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bananas_are_good_9/pseuds/bananas_are_good_9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John isn't sure what to believe anymore...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shell Shocked

**Author's Note:**

> I got the idea for this story from a video I saw on youtube...same name if you want to look it up. If i can figure it out I'll try to put a link somewhere... Until then, enjoy!!
> 
> Also, this is A LOT of just words... Sorry about that, it just sort of happened...
> 
> I own nothing

John Hamish Fredrickson had never been a lucky person. It wasn’t by any fault of his, he was dealt a bad hand from the get go. As he grew older, he just thought it was the only thing his father had given him. Well, that and his temper. 

Tom Fredrickson had never been a smart man when it came to running his business but the Fredricksons were well off enough to enjoy the status that came with it. It all had been going fine until a few years after his first child, Harriet, was born. The growing family lived in a relatively quiet town. It wasn’t as though everyone knew one another but it wasn’t a sprawling city either. The town was small enough, however, to have one shop or building for each various thing a person should need. One market, one barber, one of each level of school –sans university-, and such. Tom, for instance, was the only person who ran a hardware store, and was fine with it staying that way.

However, in the summer of Harriet’s fourth year, the mayor had decided to build a Flor-Mart in hopes of attracting more people to the area. They had everything thing they needed to go ahead with the building; the funds, the supplies, the plans, etc. the one thing they were missing was the space for the project. In an effort to fix their problem, the city began buying the land back from the store owners –the shops had all been, rather conveniently, in the same area.

Tom despised the city’s plans. He has a strict policy of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ which he stuck to when the town council came to him with an offer. Characteristically, he turned it down. The store was doing as well as it always had and he had the town’s loyalty. Why should he have any reason to be worried?

Fredrickson kept that way of thinking until two months after the construction had finished, fourteen months after the council’s initial proposal. In those two months, sales had gone down 70% at the hardware store. Tom and Claire, his wife, grew worried. They had never seen sales this low in the ten years they had run the shop and they had a five and a half year old to care for, not to mention that Claire was four months gone with another.

The Fredricksons were able to hold on to their land for another few weeks before they had no other choice but to sell. The town had eagerly jumped on it, although their offer was significantly smaller than what it had been. Tom, enraged at losing his store, sold their small house and moved his family to London in hoped of finding work in the city. It had seemed that their luck had turned for the better, nearly the first store Tom had walked in hired him after a short interview.

They didn’t have time to celebrate on their luck for nearly a month later, John was born. An entire two months too early.

He was a fairly small baby, even for a preemie, and it took his sometime to master his three milestones. At two months, John had gotten the handle on breathing and eating without help, he just wasn’t able to keep himself warm without the incubator. Even when he had mastered nursing, the milk seems to go straight through him, providing the minimum amount of nutrition as possible without allowing him to put on any weight.

John had to stay in the incubator until he was nearly six months old. During the intervening weeks, Tom had turned to the bottle “to help with the stress in my life,” as he put it. It didn’t start out as much – it never really does, does it? After John was born and his wife was released from the hospital, tom went out to have a few pints with his mates from work a couple nights a week. Then it became drinks with friends after every work day. When his friends couldn’t make it, Fredrickson saw nothing wrong with drinking alone. Eventually, his friends stopped coming altogether and Tom’s night drinking turned into day drinking as well. “First to the pub, last to leave.” became his new motto.

It wasn’t until John was eight months old when the liquor wasn’t enough to quell Tom's anger. After John turned nine months old and wasn’t reaching the milestones he should have reached, Tom began taking his frustrations out on his wife.

He was always drunk whenever it happened. Tom would beat his wife; blaming her for what happened to the store, saying it was her fault that John had been born premature, yelling that if she had done something different then John would be crawling like other babies instead of just sitting there trying to keep himself upright. In the morning, after he had sobered up, when he saw what he had done, Tom would beg forgiveness and he would always receive it. As time passes, the apologies grew few and further apart while John's mother became introverted, a shadow of the person she once was.

In addition to being small and a bit slow on accomplishments, John was a very quiet baby. (Not that he never cried; he would wail nearly every time his father came home, causing his mother to be punished for giving him such an annoying thing). There was nothing he could really do about it. He and Harriet were often left alone in the house for hours on end – their mother had to work several jobs so support her husband’s drinking – and when he did babble at someone, he rarely received a reply.

Harriet did her best when it came to John. When their mother started working more, Harriet paid rapt attention when being shown how to warm a bottle using a bowl and kettle as well as how to properly change a diaper. She would also sooth him at night when their parent were dead asleep for various reasons – and when their father was with their mother. The six and a half year old matured as quickly as she could and, looking back, John knows that he could have easily died if she hadn’t done as good a job as she did.

Five months after his first birthday, which was a quiet affair with his mother and sister, John had decided that crawling wasn’t working for him anymore. So, in an effort to remedy the problem, he pulled himself up and began toddling over to where Harriet was coloring. She glanced up at his excited babbling and showered him with words of praise when he collapsed in her arms. After a short hug, he was already pushing back up to practice his newfound skill.

After John's first steps, Harriet made it her personal mission to teach her baby brother as much as she could. John's babbling began to slowly turn into words due to his sister’s work. Three months after he started walking, John began greeting the animals in a farm book Harriet would read him.

Each animal would receive a breathy, weak sounding, “Hiya.” after Harriet read out its name. On one such occasion, he even went so far as a, “Hi duh.” for the small, tan dog in the book. By the time he was two years and three months old, John had a few solid words under his belt. The main thing he loved to do was demand for things. Ya, no, Har’, ‘ood, and wa’er were daily things what were heard around the Fredrickson flat.

John had never witnessed what his father did to his mother until he was three. Harriet (who had recently turned nine and now seemed eligible for her father’s…punishments) had been unable to keep the curious toddler away after she had dropped a plate she was cleaning. John, who had been placed in the living room after dinner, heard the crash and went to investigate. When he reached the small kitchen, he saw his mother and Harriet cowering in a corner with the hulking figure of his father towering above them, seething. As John looked at what was in front of him, his father yelled at his mother and sister.

“Do you see what you make me do?” he cried. “I wouldn’t have to punish you if you were able to do as you were told!” John, who had walked over to his father’s side unnoticed, stood between Tom and the shivering figured on the ground.

“No.” John told the ox of a man above him in a way only a young child could. Fredrickson smirked as he lifted his fist.

This day is John's earliest memory – even if the only thing he can remember is a large shadow and his mother’s scream.

Also on this day, John was brought to the emergency room with a fractured skull, bruised ribs, a broken arm, and a broken leg (although it was more like shattered; the doctors needed to put skrews in his leg to aide his recovery). As soon as the doctors had seen the damage John had been delt, he and Harriet were immediately taken from their parents and placed in the foster care system.

Over the course of the next year, Harriet had been in and out of her share of houses while John had to stay at the home and heal. After the pins and various casts were removed, John waited anxiously for the inevitable day he would go to a stranger’s house for god knows how long. He only waited a month before Harriet was sent back from wherever she was. He didn’t see her return but one night, John was awoken    in the middle of the night by his sister telling him to get his stuff and that they were leaving.

John would then live on the streets for the next eleven years before he is adopted by Wilson and Martha Watson and his life seemed like it would be changing for the better.

However, this isn’t where our story begins. It begins the day John met _him_.


End file.
